Egypt at CESCR

Egypt’s performance under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is the subject of this year’s review by that treaty’s monitoring body, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). This will mark the first such review in 13 years, since the last round in the year 2000.

States party to the Covenant are required to submit their self-evaluation reports to CESCR every five years, as one of their treaty obligations to the other treaty parties and to the people living in the country. However, Egypt has missed two deadlines, in 2003 and 2008, finally submitting its official report to CESCR in late 2010. The report has been translated from Arabic and available as a public document since December 2011, which means that the information contained in the report predates the most dramatic changes in the country resulting from the uprising of January 2011.

When CESR convenes in mid-May 2013 to review the State party report, the experts on the Committee will be asking themselves—and the Government of Egypt—what facts have changed since the “revolution.” In formulating its list of questions for the Egyptian authorities in that session, the Committee will benefit from additional information to guide the “constructive dialog” with the Egyptian delegation at Geneva in November 2013.

Many sources give the overwhelming impression that, in the exercise of economic, social and cultural rights in Egypt, very little has changed since 2011. That is the consistent message of nongovernmental organizations who have submitted special parallel reports to CESCR this year in order to support the Committee’s review process. Those contributors include Amnesty International, Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children and a joint report by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Madrid-based Center for Economic and Social Rights.

This year, Habitat International Coalition cooperated with Amnesty International locally to provide training for 19 local organizations and popular committees on parallel reporting to CESCR. The result was a collective parallel report focusing on the conditions and developments related to the human right to adequate housing (Article 11 of the Covenant) since the last review of Egypt in 2000.

That collective process is expected to evolve in the next stage, in which the State party responds to the Committee’s questions and the Egyptian civil society prepares a comprehensive parallel report in response to those issues, which form the agenda of the later constructive dialog in Geneva. The process of compiling the collective civil society parallel report is expected to draw on the specialties of a wide range of Egyptian human rights organizations and include human rights-based budget analysis developed in the cooperation with the International Budget Partnership.

The eventual “Concluding Observations” of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, issued after the full dialog in November, will serve as a living document of findings and recommendation measures for Egypt’s compliance with its obligations under the Covenant. The application of the “Concluding Obligations” then becomes a local task for both the Government of Egypt and civil society monitors. The intended outcome is to realize the human rights objectives of the revolution by using the Covenant as a tool for guiding the needed reforms finally toward economic and social justice for Egyptians.

Links:

State party report

Collective HIC report on OHCHR website

Terminology Corner: Parallel report